Guo Pei: An Alternate Universe

Renowned fashion designer Guo Pei is known for her lavish embroidery and extravagant gowns. Perhaps most famously in the West: Rihanna's regal, fur-trimmed yellow cape worn to the 2015 Met Gala, pictured below. Since that showstopping moment, Guo’s reputation has grown worldwide. What makes this modern, female designer so unique?

From Her Hometown to the Met Gala: Guo Pei’s Rise to Fame

Born during Mao’s cultural revolution in China, Guo Pei did not have ample freedom to explore fashion growing up. From the age of two, she helped her mother sew clothing for her and her family. Guo’s father, a former battalion leader of the People’s Army, rejected her creative expression, taking care to dispose of her sketches and art. Guo sought comfort in her grandmother, who told her stories of life and fashion in the late days of the Qing dynasty. Despite an upbringing that threatened to stifle her spirit, in 1986, Guo Pei graduated from the Beijing Second Light Industry School at the top of her class with a degree in fashion design.

Buoyed by China’s increasing fashion demand after Deng Xiaoping rose to power in 1978, Guo found a job at one of China’s first privately-owned clothing brand manufacturers, Tianma. After working under these designers for several years, she launched her own brand and atelier, Rose Studio, in 1997. As the artist’s representation grew, Guo designed clothing used in Olympic ceremonies and adorned by Chinese celebrities. She has since gained worldwide recognition: a product of her unforgettable Met Gala debut. Her looks now adorn runways and museums across the globe, establishing Guo Pei as a champion of couture fashion.

Gilded Glory

Guo Pei documents the process of creating her pieces, from the initial sketch to their runway debut. One gown typically takes one to two years to create, although more elaborate pieces may take much longer. Guo emphasizes how important it is for her to not rush the creative process, but to take time with her art and let her creativity flourish.

Guo is heavily inspired by her heritage saying, “It’s the way that I want to educate and promote Chinese culture to the world.” She draws from the historical Chinese legends that had been passed down to her from her grandmother. Through embroidery, paint, and other mediums, Guo pays homage to cultural techniques and art forms that date thousands of years.

Guo Pei frequently works with gold, the color of the imperial family, to invoke a sense of royalty into her designs. This richness is most boldly expressed in her 2006 dress “Da Jin'' or “Magnificent Gold,” pictured below. This gown took 50,000 hours for a team of skilled seamstresses to craft. It is entirely gold, with a finely detailed and fitted corset that flows into a wide skirt, complete with a neckpiece, headpiece, and arm cuffs. Guo Pei took inspiration from Buddhist art in her design process, placing lotus flowers, a symbol of purity in Buddhism, at the base of the dress. Because of how immensely complex and detailed this gown is, you may discover something new every time you look at it.

Alternate Universe

Guo Pei pushes the bounds of reality, transcending her fashion to the magical and the mythical, not caring to idle in the ordinary. She harnesses motifs from art, architecture, and legend, and transforms them into wearable art. This is clear in the pieces that debuted in Guo Pei’s Fall 2019 Haute Couture show. The collection debuted, Alternate Universe, included larger-than-life garments, which went beyond the fashion of our modern world.

The show opened with the “conjoined twins” dress, complete with extraordinary embroidery, bushels of feathers, and pannier hoop skirts. This piece, along with the rest of this collection, contains motifs surrounding death, the afterlife, and new realities. Notably, images of crows, angels, and demons are embroidered and contorted in fabric throughout the garments in this collection.

The final gown in this show diverged from the blacks and whites that populated the pieces earlier in the production. This dress bloomed with color, covered in ruched and twisted fabrics structured to resemble a garden of flowers. The ensemble, complete with a crow set on the model’s hand, conveyed an enrapturing balance between life and death.

A Force to be Reckoned With

There is no doubt that Guo Pei is a revolutionary in the world of couture fashion, simultaneously bringing back the full, lavish gowns once popular while also introducing completely new styles and techniques. Beyond this, she is one of the first Chinese couture designers to reach the level of global recognition that she has. In weaving Chinese cultural elements into her work, Guo prompts Western audiences to question what couture fashion can be. A new set of diverse designers are invited to share their own traditions in this fashion sphere.

Guo Pei’s rise to fame has certainly proven one thing: The European fashion designers who have for so long dominated couture fashion shows and tabloids are no longer the only powerhouses in the field. In addition to the pure beauty of her pieces, Guo’s designs are sewn with stories and layered with hidden meanings that evoke tremendous emotion in audiences. As she describes it best herself, “[her work] is no longer a piece of clothing, but a carrier of culture, history, human emotions and love.”

Featured Image Courtesy of Guo Pei